Page 7 of Ruthless Daddy
“Miss Anna,” he said again. He said my name the way a person who had not been called by his own first name in a while said other people’s names. With care. With the slight ceremony of returning something to its owner.
Then he reached into the blanket on his lap.
“Mr. Wendell —“
“Found ’em,” he said.
He held out a pair of gloves. Grey. Knitted. Too big — they were a man’s, and a big man’s — and beautifully, almostostentatiously clean. They had been washed recently. I could smell the soap on them from where I sat.
“I can’t,” I said.
“They’re yours.”
“Mr. Wendell. They’re yours. I can’t —“
“Found ’em,” he said again. The slightest stubbornness in it. The thing in his face that had been folded over a few times in the last however many years it had been, but was still there at the centre, the thing that decided what he gave and to whom. “Wasn’t using ’em. They got holes in the thumbs anyway.”
They didn’t have holes in the thumbs. I could see the thumbs from here. The thumbs were intact.
“Mr. Wendell.”
He put them down on the cardboard between us. He took his hands back. He picked up his coffee and looked across State Street at a pigeon that had taken an interest in a hot dog wrapper, as though the gloves had been a thing that had happened by themselves and were no longer his concern.
I picked them up.
They were warm from being inside his coat.
“Thank you,” I said, and my went a little tight at the back. I corrected it. I made my face do what my face did.
“Put ’em on,” he said, not looking at me.
I put them on. They went almost to my elbows. I made my hands into fists inside them. The wool was thick and slightly scratchy and the warmth was immediate and ridiculous, like being given a second body.
“There you go,” he said.
I sat with him for a few more minutes, because to leave any faster would have been to admit that something had happened. We talked about Mosley. He told me which book to read next when I got the chance, and I told him I would, and we both pretended that I had a chance.
When I stood up to go, he raised the coffee cup at me, a small private salute.
I walked half a block before I let myself look at my hands again. The grey wool, ridiculous, warm. I curled my fingers inside the gloves and felt them work.
I kept walking.
TheIntelligentsiaonRandolphwas my eleven o’clock. I had three cafés in rotation. I had been to the Intelligentsia six times in three weeks. The barista with the septum ring had started saying hi in a way that was already too much, and after today I was going to have to retire it and switch to the Sawada Coffee on Lake for the next month.
I went because the wifi was clean. No portal page, no captive sign-in. You connected and you were on, and you were on as anyone you wanted to be. I went because the back booth had a sightline on the front door and a second sightline on the side exit through the corridor by the bathrooms, and you could see the kitchen pass from where you sat, which meant you could see anyone the staff was looking at. I went because the small drip coffee was two-fifty and you could nurse it for two hours if you topped it up with water from the carafe.
I ordered the small drip. The barista with the septum ring said hi like I was a regular. I gave her a smile that was friendly enough to register as a person and bland enough not to be remembered.
I took the back booth. I opened the laptop. The laptop was a four-year-old refurbished ThinkPad I had paid cash for in Madison eight days into my run, and it had a piece of black electrical tape over the camera and a privacy filter on the screen that made it unreadable from any angle but mine. I logged intothe VPN. I logged into the Tor browser inside the VPN, which was unnecessary and slow and made my coffee go cold faster, but I did it anyway, because eight years at a hedge fund had taught me that there was no such thing as too much precaution.
I ran my searches.
Angela Baggio. My name—my real one.
I checked for variations. Misspellings.
Then I moved onto the case number for United States v. Halberd Capital Partners. The name of the senior partner I had testified against. The name of the junior partner I had testified against. The name of the senior partner’s wife, who had appeared in a society magazine in 2019 in a column about charity galas and who I had decided, after extensive analysis, was probably the more dangerous of the two of them.
